The Doctor would have never thought he’d be saying this, but for the first time in his over 900 years of living, he could see the benefit of having four legs instead of two. Made running for his life a lot easier, and the Doctor somehow got the sneaking suspicion that if he lived through this, he’d be doing it again someday. He did have that sort of luck, after all. He continued his galloping down the hallways, rounding a corner easily with his newfound longer stride.
“Is there a plan here?” Raven shouted towards the Doctor, before looking behind her to the Weeping Angel. Another flash and flicker of the lightning. It seemed closer now than ever before.
“Well… Right now it’s keeping ourselves from getting killed, really. After that, find a way to stop that Angel,” the Doctor explained.
“Is there a way to stop it?” Raven asked, her eyes narrowing under her glasses. The Doctor hmmed to himself.
“Well, in theory… Yes. Angels. They’re Quantum Locked in Time and Space. They can only move when you’re not looking at them. When someone’s got their eyes on them, they’re stone. A stone statue can’t kill you… But take your eyes off it, and oh yes it can…” He whispered out in fear.
At about that point, the Doctor remembered a theory, now proven to be true called the Quantum Zeno Effect, or the Turing Paradox. In essence, the effect was a situation where there consisted of an unstable particle, that like the Weeping Angels in some form if kept under constant observation would never decay and form another particle. For example, the Doctor could observe an unstable atomic nucleus, freezing it if you will, and it would prevent the emission of other particles or radiation. The Doctor then remembered a quote by Robin Gandy (A letter really, to Max Newman after Alan Turing’s death.) he’d read in a book called Mathematical Logic as quoted by Andrew Hodges a few years back on a rare case of boredom.
It went: “It is easy to show using standard theory that if a system starts in an eigenstate of some observable, and measurements are made of that observable N times a second, then, even if the state is not a stationary one, the probability that the system will be in the same state after, say, one second, tends to one as N tends to infinity; that is, that continual observations will prevent motion. Alan and I tackled one or two theoretical physicists with this, and they rather pooh-poohed it by saying that continual observation is not possible. But there is nothing in the standard books (e.g., Dirac's) to this effect, so that at least the paradox shows up an inadequacy of Quantum Theory as usually presented.”
“So that’s with the warning Flash and Cadence gave us to not blink…” Celestia mused, her horn glowing golden as she tried to keep the castle’s lights on for as long as possible. But unbelievably, fantastically, the Angel’s own natural abilities seemed to counteract her every move. The Princess of the Sun’s eyes widened in shock. “If they weren’t trying to kill my little ponies, I would commend this so-called Angel. Its abilities are, as much as I hate to admit it, nothing short of amazing…”
Right about then, the foursome came across a door. And guess what? It was locked. The Doctor whipped out his Sonic and began unlocking lock after lock on the door, but all the while the Weeping Angel began getting closer.
“Come on… Come on…” the Doctor muttered to himself as he continued breaking the locks. “Who the Hell puts this many locks on a door anyways?” He thought to himself. He then realized what door he was in front of and swore quietly in Gallifreyian to himself. He’d led the Angel right to the door that held the TARDIS behind it, the perfect meal for any Weeping Angel. And he himself had ordered all of the locks for this door set like this to keep the Angel as far away from the Old Girl as possible.
Then he heard it, a small whispered “Doctor…” and he, Shining and Celestia whirled around only to gain looks of horror and fear on their face as they saw Raven, with the Weeping Angel holding her in such a way that it could easily snap her neck.
“Nonononononononononono…” the Doctor murmured to himself in horror. No, not again… Not another one…
“Raven!” Celestia shouted.
Shining took several deep breathes as he tried to think. He wanted to save Raven, he really did, but from what the Doctor had told them, Shining had gathered that there was nothing he or even Princess Celestia herself could do. If any of them made a movement, or even just blinked Raven would die all that much quicker, and she wouldn’t be able to complete her last form of assistance towards Celestia.
“I’m sorry Princess, but it looks like you’ll have to find a new assistant…” Raven choked out, all the while lighting up her horn, and above her, the bricks in the ceiling began to loosen. “I don’t think I’ll be able to help you with your paperwork much longer, it seems…”
She then turned to the Doctor, giving him a sad look as she looked directly at him. “My only wish Doctor, is that you could have seen me at my best. Just go, run! I can slow this thing down, but not for long,”
The Doctor let a tear slip from his eye as he whispered “I’d like to believe I have. And Raven, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…”
Raven smiled as a tear dripped from her eyes before she wiped it away with a hoof. No, better to face death with dignity than to let anypony see her cry like a coward. “Celestia, you were right. This world doesn’t belong to us, not any more than the eagle owns the sky. We’re all a part of a grand design, and I’ve figured out my place in it long ago. Helping you in any way I can… Now, let me do it one last time. RUN!”
Celestia nodded sadly, a tear slipping from her eye, and even as she teleported the Doctor, herself and Shining away she heard the distinct sickening crack of a neck snapping and bricks tumbling from the ceiling onto stone.
“Not again… Not again…” the Doctor whispered to himself over and over, the sound of Raven’s neck snapping playing out in his mind again and again. “Another death, another death that’s all my fault!”
Then, he felt a hoof soundly slap him across the face. The Doctor groaned as he saw Celestia looking at him harshly.
“No, it’s not your fault. You didn’t drag Raven into this, despite anything you may say. Maybe you’ll make some mistakes in the future, everypony does, even you, but there are plenty of good things and Raven’s death was not on you. It was on the Weeping Angel’s, nobody else’s. I’ve gotten the feeling that you don’t let anypony dictate the rules, so why should you now? So pick yourself off the floor and do what you do best. Save the world, and be the Madman in the Box that you are,”
“How… How do you know who I am? How do you know so much about me?” The Doctor stuttered out. “Who are you, Princess Celestia?”
“I don’t really know that much about you, to be honest… You’ve shown up a few times in my timeline, decades or sometimes centuries, before this day. You never told me much about yourself, in fear of corrupting the timeline as you put it. But when you were needed, you and that fantastical machine were always there,” Celestia stated, leaving out the parts about Shining and the other ponies that accompanied him at times. It was probably for the best that the Doctor didn’t know too much about his own future.
“Right then…” the Doctor growled out, a look of fury etching its way onto his features. “We don’t have long before the Angel finds us again, so we need to figure out a way to stop it.
“Doctor... “ Shining began, still in shock over Raven’s death along with everything else that had happened and still recomposing himself. “Would it be possible to kill a Weeping Angel somehow?”
“Well, yes, in theory…” He mused to himself before his eyes slowly widened as he realized what Shining was thinking and gave him a small noogie as he let out a triumphant cry of “HOH YES! Molto Bene! That’s genius! Completely insane, really and with very little chance of working but it just might do it!” He cried out, jumping for joy. “You’d just need something strong enough to shatter stone completely…”
“And I think I know just the thing,” Shining stated. “Canterlot Castle has an Ancient and Legendary Artifacts of Ponykind wing -and before you ask Doctor, that is the exact name- which has something that just might be what we need. I’ll need to get there and back though, without attracting the Weeping Angel’s attention. So, problem…”
“Which I can help with. I think I know the artifact in question, and what you plan to do with it. I can get you there, while the Doctor draws the Angel’s fire, so to speak,” Celestia stated, and the Doctor nodded.
“I’m a complicated Space-Time event. The Angel would latch onto me like a lion to a wildebeest. Put simply, I’m very juicy meat for it. Live bait, if you will. So please do hurry, as death by stone statue is not on the ways I’d want to go. Very embarrassing, frankly...” the Time Lord joked, in an attempt to lighten the mood. And it didn't really work, not in the slightest with both Shining and Celestia giving him looks. The Doctor sighed to himself, his mouth sometimes got ahead of his brain.
“Well then, let’s get to work…” Shining stated before Celestia teleported him and her away leaving the Doctor alone.
Very quickly, the Weeping Angel latched onto his scent and as the Doctor wandered into the ballroom, now devoid of partygoers he heard it.
“Very eerie scene, really…” the Doctor commented in an offhand manner, seemingly unaware of the Angel’s presence. “Ballroom, no couples dancing about and no music. Mind you, I can fix that,”
The Doctor then whirled around face a speaker system and “Hush hush, here comes the Boogeyman” began to play once more. “There, much better. Care to dance?”
He whirled around to face the Angel.
“Ohhhhhh, you think you’re so clever, latching onto me like you did… Hell, any old sod can do that. Not like I’m invisible, really,” the Doctor joked, his eyes briefly flicking to the left as he saw a golden flash behind a pillar. “Generally, people, or in this case ponies, know I’m around. You probably think you’ve lured me into a trap, don’t you? Well, let me tell you something. If there’s one thing you should know, if you value your continued existence, there’s one thing you never put in a trap… Me,” the Doctor stated with a grin, showing his pearly whites before he shouted out “Shining, now!”
As Shining leaped from behind with Rockhoof’s legendary hammer in his mouth and Celestia using all of her power just to keep the lights lit the Doctor’s tone turned from triumphant to furious. “You shouldn’t have killed Raven, I liked her. I would have offered you a chance for mercy, but the moment you started killing… You lost that chance. And I don’t give second ones…”
With a powerful blow of the hammer and a noise like thunder, the Angel shattered as a shockwave echoed throughout the ballroom, windows shattering into millions of little glass shards all around them. The Doctor let out a sigh of relief as he looked upon what remained of the Angel. And then he turned his back.
The Doctor’s eyes widened as he heard… something. It was impossible to describe, but the next thing he knew he whirled around and let out a nervous swallow as he saw the Angel completely reforming itself.
“No… No, that’s impossible… Damn it!” the Doctor swore. It seemed, as long as pieces of an Angel remained, you could never destroy it completely. But Celestia had a way to fix that. The temperature around everypony in the room seemed to skyrocket, and the Doctor tugged at his tie. Celestia’s eyes flared and her wings expanded to their full length as her horn began glowing a solid gold, as bright as the sun itself. Celestia stood defiantly, her mane blowing in some unexplained fashion.
“You think you can harm my little ponies? Do you? Well, you, you foul monstrosity, you can think again! You think yourself above us all, but from my perspective, you look so small! I've lived a long old life and lost things you'd never understand. Now do me a favor, and BURN!”
With that declaration, she fired a blast of pure hot flame at the Angel and an ear piercing shriek -indescribable except for something out of the mouth of Hell itself- filled the room. The Doctor’s eyes widened as he realized it was the Angel itself screaming as it became nothing but ashes on the floor...